The following "Researcher Reflection" from Dr. Alicia Mayer is part of an ongoing series spotlighting CSWR scholars and their research.
Calvinist Christian doctrines brought to New England by the Puritans inspired adverse reactions against the many “different others” they encountered, especially Indigenous Americans, who did not fit a Calvinist God’s providential scheme of salvation. In this unknown, unexplored American landscape, native others were considered unsaved, nor could they be saved. The idea fueled the difficult, tense, and frequently violent relationships between Anglo-American Puritans and Indigenous Americans. Indeed, this theology could not envision unconverted people to be men, and so the Puritans could hardly conceive equality with the indigenous they considered subhuman.
To pursue genuine change in the United States, contemporary Americans must take a hard look into history to understand the founding and consequences of prejudices, stereotypes, harmful myths. New England Puritanism, thereby Calvinism, is a large part of American history. Puritan theology inspired the oppressive treatment of not just Indigenous Americans but all non-puritan religious groups (Catholics, Quakers, Anabaptists, and so forth) as well as enslaved Africans and their offspring. Such aspects of theology continue to fuel systematic inequality and violence in the United States.
The different other is born into a different culture where individuals might not be saved by God’s grace alone. It is not that Puritans and Calvinists asserted non-Europeans and non-Whites could not be saved. They did not explicitly make this claim. Yet, in practice, the different others were beyond the scope of salvation.
Puritans did not value indigenous cultural and ecological features. Yet, Puritan authors documented native cosmovision, habits and manners, ways of living, transcendent beliefs, diet, marriage customs, family life, clothing, language, funeral traditions, war practices, tribal alliances, housing, hunting techniques, and so forth. This is precious anthropological content for the modern scholar, despite Puritan authors’ negative Anglo-American standpoints.
My current research at the CSWR follows what Juan Ortega Medina identifies as “theological racism” and Udo Hebel’s “ethnocentric racism”. My book project titled Religion and Race: New England Puritans’ Perception of the Different-Other in a New World Context. A Theological Perspective documents how Puritanism in New England contributed to systematic inequality and historical racism, a far-reached consequence of John Calvin’s theology.
Calvin’s core theological arguments set up stark distinctions between souls and, thereby, distinctions between people. God separates the elect, chosen for eternal salvation, from the unbeliever, the reprobate. Some people are doubly predestined not to be saved and not able to be saved. It follows that the cultural and racial other, the different other, would also be theologically other. Calvinists maintain mankind's innate depravity: original sin inevitably drives every human to sinful behavior, their actions mixed with evil. The unsaved are depraved. Calvin said, “man is but rottenness and a worm, abominable and vain, drinking in iniquity like water.”
Early eighteenth-century Puritan figures like the Reverend William Cooper defined the Second Coming of Christ as the “great discriminating Day” where “there should be a different event to the Believer and the Unbeliever…one shall be taken, and another shall be left.” Unbelievers would be “left in the hands of the Devil, left to go on in sin till they perish wonderfully, and are destroyed without Remedy.” The unbeliever, described in terms nearly identical to Calvin’s description of the reprobate, is fundamentally different from the believer, just as the Anglo-Americans viewed indigenous people to be fundamentally different from themselves. Cooper, however, did acknowledge Blacks could be saved.
Twentieth-century scholars like Robert Ricard identify a “spiritual conquest” carried out by sixteenth-century empires in America. Converting indigenous people throughout the Americas aimed to change cultures, completely dismantling or “dislocating” cultural foundations. John Cotton, a Puritan theologian stated in 1642 that to convert the indigenous peoples it was necessary to transform them first to civility, then to humanity. Puritans had to “make them men before making them Christians.” The non-Christian indigenous were subhuman. The so-called White Mans’ Burden justified imperial conquest to civilize non-Europeans, and it was operative long before Rudyard Kipling coined the phrase.
These religious precepts were divisive, justifying discrimination against all those deemed unsaved and unable to be saved (even if, as Calvin argued, the unsaved did not actively resist salvation but were merely foolish and childish). It is hard to argue for equality when the other is not considered capable of redemption. Empathy is difficult when the other—not elect and incapable of salvation—might as well not be considered a full human. Those who did not fit God’s providential schemes of salvation were left in a vulnerable position. Consciously and unconsciously, Calvinist doctrines in Puritan New England, so different from the European origins, shaped everyday experience and practice when Puritans encountered these different others who would ultimately have their cultures decimated and the majority of their populations killed.
—by Dr. Alicia Mayer, Visiting Scholar